Françoise Gilot

Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris
Private Collection, Paris

The canvas is not lined. Colors are bold and vibrant. The surface is nicely textured, with some thin lines of craquelure and a few extremely minor losses including 1 to the lower right of the figure's hair. Under UV light: some original pigments fluoresce and there are some small strokes of inpainting in certain areas including the red plane at lower left. In work is in good condition.
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Gilot employs her singular Cubist style to create an intimate portrait of Paloma, her five-year-old daughter with fellow artist Pablo Picasso. Gilot boldly fashions her daughter in her own likeness a few months after leaving Picasso for good, thereby declaring her artistic and familial autonomy. As in her own mesmerizing self-portrait (fig. 1), Gilot situates her daughter within their home and powerfully manipulates contrasting complementary colors. If hung as a pair facing one another, the images are reminiscent of Dutch pendent portraits from the eighteenth century and are visual declarations of Pablo’s exclusion from their likeness and affection.

In 1949 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler had offered Gilot a contract to become her exclusive dealer—she would be one of only two women artists ever under contract with Kahnweiler during his entire influential career as a dealer—and in 1952 she received even further encouragement with subsidiary contracts from both the Curt Valentin Gallery in New York and the Leicester Gallery in London. She would later describe this representation in London and New York as a further impetus to proceed with a life distinct from Picasso: “I knew Paris was no longer the centre but I hesitated between London and New York. My work was with two galleries in London, which were holding it because in France things had got rather difficult for me—leaving Picasso was seen as a big crime and I was no longer welcome. During the 1960s I had a studio in Sydney Close, Chelsea, given me on the recommendation of the director of the Tate, but I always had more collectors in the US than anywhere else, so it made sense to relocate here for work” (quoted in Françoise Gilot: Works on Paper (exhibition catalogue), Elkon Gallery, New York, 2006).